Search

Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman and committee members. I am pleased to introduce you to Carolyn Wilkins, who assumed the post of Senior Deputy Governor of the Bank of Canada on 2 May of this year. Before we take your questions, let me give you some of the highlights of the economic outlook. I’ll draw mainly […]

Canada's reliance on foreign trade has required us to be active internationalists for decades. Louis Rasminsky, who went on to become Governor of the Bank of Canada, was one of Canada's delegates at the Bretton Woods Conference that led to the creation of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. Rasminsky played an important role, formal and informal, at the talks.

The Bank of Canada (BoC), RBC Capital Markets, RBC Investor Services, TD Bank Group (TD), and Export Development Canada (EDC) successfully completed Project Samara, a collaborative initiative to evaluate how tokenization and distributed ledger technology (DLT) can improve bond issuance and settlement in a real-world setting.

Throughout the years, Canada has been a major beneficiary of London's innovation. Companies of adventurers, conceived and funded in London, opened up large swathes of Canada to international trade.

Corporate bond spreads worldwide have widened markedly since the beginning of the credit crisis in 2007. This article examines default and liquidity risk–the main components of the corporate bond spread–for Canadian firms that issue bonds in the U.S. market, focusing in particular on their evolution during the credit crisis. They find that, during this period, the liquidity component increased more for speculative-grade bonds than it did for investment-grade bonds, consistent with a "flight-to-quality" phenomenon. An important implication of their results for policy-makers seeking to address problems in credit markets is that the liquidity risk in corporate spreads for investment and speculative bonds behaves differently than the default risk, especially during crisis episodes.

Comments: On 18 July 2000, the government and Bank of Canada made public a discussion paper concerning the management of the federal government's cash balances. The paper outlined the current framework and proposed changes, intended to increase competition and to strengthen the management of risks, in particular the credit risks involved in the investment of […]

We analyze Canadian data from the Bank of Canada’s Business Leaders’ Pulse, examining firms’ sales growth expectations. We find that expected growth predicts outcomes, uncertainty influences forecast errors and revisions, and firms with weak past performance anticipate and experience weaker future growth. These results highlight the survey’s value for understanding business expectations.

The Standing Liquidity Facility (SLF) is one of the Bank of Canada’s least discussed tools—and one of its most important. Embedded directly in Canada’s high value payment system, Lynx, the SLF operates quietly in the background every business day, ensuring the smooth settlement of payments and reinforcing the implementation of monetary policy.

The hedge fund industry has been growing so quickly that meetings like this one are welcome—they provide a chance to step back and look at context and trends. And that's what I propose to do this morning. Specifically, I'd like to speak about volatility in both the real economy and in financial markets and discuss how it has been affected by monetary policy and financial innovation.

Ron Morrow, Executive Director of Payments, Supervision and Oversight, talks about the evolution of payments in Canada, as well as the Bank’s new supervisory role for payment service providers.